


i had never dared to ask.

by carrotstix



Series: starlight. [6]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alex Is Everyone's Big Sister, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, F/F, Gen, Let Winn Have Angst 2k17
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 06:50:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12789150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carrotstix/pseuds/carrotstix
Summary: “It doesn’t, as it turns out, because any thought of having a crush on Lena disappears when Kara gets on the train at the beginning of their second year, and Winn’s mind blanks for a second, because she’s taller, her face is slimmer, her hair is glowing golden and all he can think is that he understands the word beautiful in that moment.”or, Winn Schott and one scene from each of his years at Hogwarts, running parallel to ‘made of starlight’





	i had never dared to ask.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote most of this in two days, and then i did the next piece in the same amount of time. you is welcome.  
> title is from 'waltz for pony' by BOY, because all work titles are taken from lyrics from songs in the series playlist [the link & tracklist to which is the series description]

_first._

Winn gets partnered up with the same Slytherin girl in both Herbology and Potions, and her name is Lena Luthor.

(Apparently, it’s supposed to be some big deal, her last name. Winn doesn’t really get it, because he knows Lex Luthor is her brother, that he went crazy and attacked a bunch of people, but how is that Lena’s fault?)

The first thing Winn notices about Lena is that she’s pretty, with long dark hair and these soft green eyes. The second thing is that she’s smart, ridiculously so, and amazing at both of the classes they share. Something about her tells him that she’s probably great at all of her subjects, and something about her has him struck.

They start studying in the library, and it quickly turns into a friendship. Winn’s really proud of himself for it, in the end, because it’s the first time he’s really taken initiative in getting to know someone, and now he’s made a friend from it, all on his own, so he invites her to sit at his table, with him and Kara and Barry and everyone else.

“Are you sure your friends would be okay with that?” She asks, and he’s confused.

“Why wouldn’t they be?”

“Because I’m a Slytherin,” she answers, and something about it seems rehearsed and defeated. “And a Luthor. I’m not exactly the most… well liked here.”

He smiles back at her, still a little thrown off.. “They won’t care about that,” he assures her, because they won’t, or they shouldn’t. “They might have to warm up to you, but they’re good people.”

She agrees, in the end, and he’s ecstatic to see her later at dinner. She’s a quiet kind of nervous, but he does his best to introduce her to everyone and to get them talking to her. The whole meal, he’s practically bouncing with excitement.

James teases him about it a week later which, Winn will admit, confuses him, until the older boy finally turns and fixes him with a look.

“You have a crush on Lena, don’t you?”

Winn tilts his head. “Do I?”

James rolls his eyes. “Look,” he sighs. “Do you think she’s pretty?”

“Yeah,” Winn replies, as if it were obvious, because Lena _is_ pretty. It’s not really something to debate, it’s just… good genetics on display.

“And do you like her?”

“Well, yeah.”

“So you probably have a crush on her,” James finishes. After a moment, Winn nods, because it makes sense, doesn’t it?

And for the rest of the year, he believes it. He figures he has a crush on her, because of course he does. He thinks she’s smart, and she’s pretty, and that means he’s got to like her like that.

Doesn’t it?

  


_second._

It doesn’t, as it turns out, because any thought of having a crush on Lena disappears when Kara gets on the train at the beginning of their second year, and Winn’s mind blanks for a second, because she’s taller, her face is slimmer, her hair is glowing golden and all he can think is that he understands the word beautiful in that moment.

“Hey Winn,” Kara chirps, sweeping him into a hug, and he can’t manage to come up with a response that isn’t him blinking at her in utter shock, because _how did one summer do this to her?_ Suddenly, Kara has marked the transition from eleven to twelve with some sort of godly grace, blue eyes and blonde hair and gorgeous. He feels struck dumb,  a little, like he’s watching everything in his entire life shift.

Kara, for her part, is completely oblivious to everything running through his head in this moment. Instead, she starts to tease Barry for the new hairstyle he’s adopted, and Winn jumps on board with it to distract himself, calling Barry a surfer boy despite the fact that it’s a reference rooted in muggle culture that the other two likely won’t understand. The whole time, Barry pouts, but he’s still grinning, so he’s clearly not that upset, and it’s a welcome change of thought for Winn, who’s in the process of trying his hardest not to stare at Kara in shock.

Only a moment later, Kara’s pushing him into the seat and settling her legs over him as she tries to get comfortable in the seat. He can feel the warmth starting in his cheeks when she looks over and catches his gaze focused on her. She seems unaffected, but a large part of that is because Lena just happens to pass by outside the window at that moment, and Barry jumps up to go catch her.

She comes back grinning, allowing herself to be pulled into a hug. She may not be that short, but standing next to Barry after he’s shot up an inch over the summer, she looks oddly small in her green and silver robes.

(Lena’s eyes crinkle up in the corners as she smiles at Kara, but beside Winn, the blonde is absolutely beaming, all but bouncing up and down in her seat. As he glances back and forth between the two girls, Winn remembers what James said last year and wow, was he wrong.)

  


_third._

One of Winn’s proudest accomplishments is convincing Kara to get a cell phone.

Winn loves the wizarding world, he really does. And in most ways, it’s far beyond muggle comprehension. There are just some things to him, though, that make no sense, and his biggest grievance is just how beyond wizards seem to be when it comes to technology.

In his book, there’s really no excuse. There’s no reason wizards shouldn’t have cell phones, shouldn’t be hooking themselves up to wifi networks and adapting to the new age. In fact, by all rights, they should be taking muggle technology and using magic to improve upon it, making it better. Instead, they seem to be still riding on waves of their own nostalgia, using quills and ink instead of pens, writing letters instead of learning how to send a text.

It’s his own personal mission to change that, and the best place to start is his own circle of friends. He starts with Kara, who already lives in a largely muggle neighborhood, and with enough needling, she’s asking Eliza for her own smart phone, and she quickly takes to using it.

As such, she and Winn spend a good amount of time calling each other on Skype. The little pixelated version of Kara’s face really doesn’t compare to the real thing, but still beautiful in it’s own right.

Their last night before school, Kara and Winn find themselves on a video call yet again. Neither of them have managed to finish packing their things yet, so the first two hours is a mess of them making fun of each other as they tear through their closets and shove things in their trunks. Kara is the first to finish, due to Alex’s help, and Winn has to dig through his room and under his bed to find all the textbooks he needs before he, too, manages to get everything he needs inside of his trunk with the lid closed and latched shut.

They should really go to bed after that, considering they have to leave for school the next morning, but they don’t. Kara doesn’t hang up, and Winn can’t bring himself to even suggest it, not when she’s on the other side of the screen smiling and laughing at him, just him. It’s a little selfish, sure, but in this moment, he has Kara all to himself. When she smiles, he doesn’t have to wonder if it’s for someone else, because there is nobody else but them.

They stay on the phone until Kara’s door creaks open, and an airborne pillow knocks her phone out of her hand. In the background, he can hear Alex’s voice, shouting _‘go to bed!’_ before the door bangs closed again. Kara bends down to retrieve the phone with a giggle, her hair falling forward and into the camera of the phone, and even as he yawns, Winn all but beams.

“I guess that means it’s time to say goodnight, huh?” Kara says, and even though her lips are still turned up at the corners, she sounds like she’s moments from passing out.

“I guess so,” Winn agrees. “Goodnight, Kara.”

“Night,” she echoes, and the last thing he sees before she hangs up is the quirk of her mouth and her bright blue eyes.

The night before he leaves for his third year of Hogwarts, Winn falls asleep with his phone slipping from his fingers, still smiling.

  


_fourth._

Winn will be the first to admit that his curiosity has gotten him into… less than pleasant situations before.

Still, in all honesty? That never really stops him, anyway. Despite the various things he’s seen or had to do purely because he stuck his nose somewhere it doesn’t belong, he keeps shoving his nose in various places anyway, unable to resist the idea of finding the source of a strange noise, or finding out something that he didn’t know before.

(Discovering things, as it turns out, is not always a good thing, and the following case? A prime example.)

Winn’s always liked to wander the halls at Hogwarts. There are several corridors in the school that are all but ignored, quiet places and empty staircases that nobody uses. He’s found them a quiet place to walk around and be able to think without the constant noise of the school plugging up his ears, because for all the usual silence of the Ravenclaw tower, his roommates don’t seem to enjoy him pacing back and forth around the room.

It’s in these halls that he’s seen things, several things, that he’d rather not remember or repeat, but his least favorite is in his fourth year. For all accounts, it’s a regular Wednesday, and there should be nothing about this day that stands out to him.

Until he hears the whine, of course.

He stops where he is, because he’s heard sounds like that before, and he’s learned that it’s usually best to ignore them. In fact, he’s all set to walk in the other direction when there’s a moan and _wait, is that Lena?_

He’s skeptical, but once he hears it again, he’s pretty sure. Still, he nearly walks away, because _duh,_ but then his head starts churning out scenarios, and what if she’s hurt and lying on the ground and he heard her but he did nothing? It doesn’t really make all that much sense, but then he’s nervous and afraid to walk away without checking, so he follows it.

Besides, there’s no way that Lena’s back here in one of the hallways doing… _that._

When he turns the corner, though, there’s Lena, doing exactly what he was sure she wasn’t doing. What might be even more shocking is who she’s doing it with, because of all people, it’s Veronica Sinclair, one hand on the wall and the other on Lena’s hip, the shorter girl pressed against the bricks.

In that moment, Winn thinks his brain might short circuit. Not even for any dirty reason, either, just the straight up shock of _there’s one of his best friends_ and _oh my god, oh my god, since when does she do this?_

Lena moans again, eyes squeezed shut and her head tipped back and Winn has the sudden urge to run the hell away and never look back, but his feet are frozen in place. He can’t seem to move, until suddenly, Veronica’s lifting her head from where it’s been buried in Lena’s neck and smiling right at him. Just the eye contact enough is to make him recoil, and he manages to find it within himself to back away, Veronica staring at him the whole time as her hand slowly inches up Lena’s shirt.

The second that he’s out of her line of sight, he rushes away, speeding off down the hallway and back to his dorm, trying to forget everything he just saw.

  


_fifth._

The day Lena tells him she and Kara are dating, they’re in the library, studying.

Or well, Winn is. Beside him, Lena is sitting there staring at her cracked open textbook, but she hasn’t flipped a page in minutes, and when he glances over, she seems distracted. He doesn’t want to push her, though, so he goes back

to his own studying and waits for her to say something.

Eventually, after a long silence, she lifts her head and looks up at him. “Hey Winn?”

He turns to her, pushing aside his own book. “What’s up?”

“So, um,” she murmurs, wringing out her hands. “You know Kara and I are dating, right?”

For a long moment, he says nothing, just blinks, staring at her with his head tilted. “You’re… what?” He replies, finally.

“We’re dating,” she repeats. “I’ve, um… I’ve had feelings for her for a really long time, and I never really told anybody because I never thought she’d like me back, but she does, and- we’re dating.”

“Oh.”

“So you didn’t know?”

“No,” he answers.

She pauses. “Really?”

“Should I have known?”

“I mean, everyone else kind of figured it out,” she explains. “I mean, Lucy’s been teasing us for the past few days… haven’t you noticed all the jokes.”

“Um, no?”

“Not even the one about Kara’s hand?”

He stops, confused. “Kara’s hand? What…?”

“You know,” Lena replies, and she starts to look a bit sheepish, turning her gaze down to the table to avoid making eye contact with Winn, her cheeks turning pink. “Because, you know… she couldn’t see Kara’s hand, it wasn’t on the table because it was on my knee, and Lucy implied that… she implied that Kara’s hand might be doing… other things.”

Winn feels his face heat up when he realizing what she’s trying to say. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Lena mumbles, rubbing a hand over the back of her neck. “So, um… Kara and I are dating.”

He nods. “Well, okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, managing a smile. “If you guys are happy, then I’m happy. I’m happy for you.”

Lena grins, green eyes lighting up, and she hums a little under her breath as she pulls her textbook open.

(He thinks back over every meal over the past year, the way Lena looks at Kara, the way the blonde lights up whenever they’re together, and he thinks that whether they know it or not, he’s never really had a chance with Kara when Lena’s been here this whole time.)

  


_sixth._

The first time Winn feels really, truly lonely at school is after Kara and Lena break up.

For the first few days afterwards, their meals take a very noticeable turn, as Kara draws into herself and instead of being her usual, rambling mess. Lena disappears from the table, and for the most part, the Great Hall. For the first week, it feels like when she left, she took all of the energy and warmth from the table, because suddenly, conversation is stilted and soft.

Slowly, things start to return to normal, but it never really feels quite the same. Kara starts to smile, but it feels a little fake on the edges, and even if Winn’s outgrown his feeling for her, it still breaks his heart a little to see it.

But as hard as it is to ignore Lena’s absence in Kara’s life, he finds himself even more caught up in the sudden empty hole he’s found in his own life.

There’s nobody to hang out with in his free time, nobody to study with in library. Now, when he cracks open his textbooks, he does it alone, curled up in the corner of the Ravenclaw common room, near the bookshelves. Sure, he still has the rest of his friends, but he’s never been all that close to Lucy, Maggie, or Alex, and Kara’s become far more withdrawn since her break-up, and Barry’s just… It’s not the same.

He finds that, once Lena starts to avoid him, he starts to avoid the rest of his friends. It starts on accident, but pretty soon, he stops reaching out to them all, doesn’t see any of them outside of meals. In his free periods, spare time on the weekend, he takes up residence within Ravenclaw tower, studying underneath the tall windows or curling up in his dorm when nobody’s around to play games on his phone. It feels a little bit like mourning, because when Kara lost Lena, everybody else did, too.

He didn’t realize how much it would effect him until Barry caught him by the elbow after lunch one day to point out that nobody’s seen Winn outside the Great Hall in almost two weeks. He shrugs, laughs it off, makes an excuse to leave and rushes away, ignoring the way Barry stares after him with concern in his eyes.

It goes on like that for another week before anybody confronts him again. This time, it’s Alex, waiting for him in his dorm room when he comes back from Charms class. When he sees her standing there, he freezes.

“What are you doing in my room?” He asks, holding his books a little closer to his chest.

“What are you doing avoiding us?” She fires back.

“That’s- okay, fair,” he concedes, and she gives him a wry sort of smile, patting the mattress beside her. He raises an eyebrow at her, because _did she just invite him to sit down on his own bed?_ But she just returns the look until he gives in, throwing his textbooks onto the lid of his trunk before plunking himself into the space next to her.

“Where’d you go, Winn?” She asks.

His gaze drops to the floor, and he shrugs. “I…,” he starts, but he trails off, unable to muster a response.

“Look, Winn,” Alex says. “I know it’s different, I know. But we… we’re still your friends, you can’t just… you can’t just disappear on us. Everybody misses Lena, but we miss you, too.”

“I sit with you guys at every meal-”

“We _only_ see you at meals,” she points out. “You don’t come outside to the courtyard, you don’t study in the library anymore. Even at meals, you’re quiet all the time, you barely speak to us.”

He shrugs, biting his lip, and Alex sighs, sliding closer to wrap her arm around him. “We miss you, Winn,” she tells him. “You have to come back to us.”

He nods, turning to meet her gaze, but Alex still looks unconvinced. “You have to promise me,” she insists. “You have to promise me that you’ll try.”

“I’ll try,” he says, and she gives him a bittersweet sort of smile as she squeezes his arm once before standing and walking away, pausing once in the doorway to look at him over her shoulder before leaving, her soft footsteps echoing in her wake until he’s left alone in the silence.

And it still feels a little hard, sometimes, when Winn still feels like an outsider next to Kara and Barry without Lena around, but the way both of their eyes light up when he meets them in the courtyard the next day makes up for most of it.

(And don’t get him wrong, even if they aren’t all that close, Winn still loves Alex in a very sisterly sort of way, but a piece of him wonders why it wasn’t Barry or Kara to come talk to him.

He pretends the idea that they didn’t want him isn’t hiding in the back of his mind, and that the thought doesn’t sting.)

  


_seventh._

Of all people, Winn is surprised that he’s the one Lena asks to go dress shopping with her.

He supposes it makes sense, because Kara’s been very insistent on her dress being a surprise, and she’s taking Barry with her. Now that Alex and Maggie have graduated, Winn guesses he’s her only real option. Still, Lena seems excited enough to go with him, so he tries to suck down his doubt and allows Lena to usher him into a dress shop.

“Where are Kara and Barry shopping?” He asks. “How many dress shops are there in Hogsmeade, anyway?”

Lena laughs, her head tipping back as she starts to browse through a rack of dresses. “There’s only the two,” she replies.

“Why do they even need two?”

“So girls whose girlfriends need are insistent on shopping without them will still have somewhere to find a dress?” Lena suggests, pulling two dresses down and hanging them over her arm. Winn snorts.

“Of course, why didn’t I think of that?” He jokes, before pausing, hand hovering over a hanger. “Hey, what size are you, again?”

“Winn, you know you’re never supposed to ask a lady questions about her size.”

“What- I- no,” he sputters, and Lena cackles.

“I’m kidding, Winn,” she assures him, rattling off her size. He nods, still a little red in the cheeks, as he checks the size of dress he’s been eyeing before snatching it up. When they head for the dressing rooms, he passes it over to Lena before she disappears into one of the stalls.

(Later, after Lena’s tried on all four options and made her purchase, the two of them step outside and Winn finds himself dwelling yet again on the fact that he’s the one Lena ended up taking with her to go shopping, but when he brings it up to her, it goes like this:)

“You’re one of my best friends, Winn,” she tells him. “You know that, right?”

Winn swallows the urge to cry as he nods. “Yeah, totally,” he says. “I knew that.”

(It’s obvious from the tone of his voice that no, he didn’t know that, but Lena just smiles, threads one of her arms through his, and pulls him along after her.

“Let’s go get some butterbeer, huh?”

“Sounds good,” he agrees, and she tugs him a little closer as they make their way up the street, both grinning like idiots because, yeah, they’re best friends.)

**Author's Note:**

> annnnd, that’s a wrap!! see you in two days with our good pal barry allen!!  
> catch me at i-am-not-carrot.tumblr.com


End file.
